Using Certification to Prove Home Lab Skills

Adrianna Frick, head of Credentialing for Canonical, started in the open source community in the late 1990s, and has had to prove her self-taught technical "cred" to access opportunities in tech from the dot com era to today. In this talk, she'll guide the community through the technical certification industry to help the self-taught home lab user how to recognize bad certifications, meaningless certificates, and credentialing programs that will actually provide value.

The open source community is in crisis: There are jobs available at companies that don't understand open source or how to evaluate skills, while there are STARs (people Skilled Through Alternate Routes) who possess valuable skills but struggle to prove their competence. Adrianna has spent years working to solve this gap and provide opportunities and paths to connect these two groups.

Learn how technical certifications in open source communities come with unique challenges, including creating systems to allow for community feedback and contribution while "closing" the source to exam answers and provisioning code to ensure exam integrity and prevent fraud. We'll also discuss how the Canonical Credentialing team avoids false negatives in scoring and works to assess skills in hands-on environments while allowing for the many, many techniques, paths, and processes Linux users may employ to solve these in-system puzzles and tasks.

We'll also talk about what to look for in technical certification to determine whether a program is developed with proper instructional design to provide a valuable assessment, and how to make sure that the program you choose is striving to maintain relevance in a fast-paced industry.